With the highly developed semiconductor technology, the currently available integrated circuits (ICs) have a largely reduced volume than before. To enable the ICs to process more data, the number of elements and components included in the current ICs is often several times of that in the conventional ICs having the same volume. However, heat produced by the ICs during operation thereof increases with the growing number of electronic elements and components in the ICs. For example, the heat produced by a common central processing unit (CPU) at full working load is high enough for burning out the whole CPU. Therefore, it is important to develop effective heat radiating means for the ICs. One solution for dissipating the heat produced by the CPU is to provide on the CPU with a heat radiating unit, such as a heat sink, so that the heat produced by the CPU may be quickly removed from the CPU. The heat radiating unit is usually fastened to the motherboard. However, the motherboard is made of a printed circuit board (PCB), which has a relatively low strength and tends to bend and deform at areas to which the heat radiating unit is fastened. In a worse condition, the motherboard would even break due to vibration and other unpredictable external forces. To overcome this problem, it has been tried by persons of ordinary skill in the art to provide a backplate for attaching to one face of the motherboard at an area opposite to the heat radiating unit, so as to increase the structural strength of the motherboard. The conventional backplate is first fixedly attached to one face of the motherboard using a bonding material or a fastening means, such as screws, before the heat radiating unit is correspondingly assembled to the other face of the motherboard. By doing this, additional cost for the bonding material or the fastening means is required. Further, once it is bonded or fastened to the motherboard, the backplate can not be removed for use for a second time.
In brief, the conventional backplate for increasing the structural strength of the motherboard has the following disadvantages: (1) uneasy to mount and requiring more time and labor costs, and (2) requiring increased manufacturing cost.
It is therefore tried by the inventor to develop an improved structure for fixing a backplate to eliminate the disadvantages in the prior art backplate.